Hilton Kramer's Provocative Time

By JOHN WILLIAMS

Published: March 29, 2012

Hilton Kramer, who died on Tuesday at 84, arrived at The New York Times in 1965 and became the paper's chief art critic in 1973. He founded the conservative literary journal The New Criterion in 1982, and he was no stranger to politicized culture wars, even if his most common tactic was to rail against the very idea of art as an ideological battleground.

Perhaps the most provocative work Mr. Kramer wrote for The Times was ''The Blacklist and the Cold War,'' a 1976 article for the Arts & Leisure section. In it he bemoaned what he saw as the historical revisionism fueling popular culture that was ''assiduously turning the terrors and controversies of the late 1940s into the entertainments and best sellers of the 1970s.''

The article coincided with the opening of ''The Front,'' a movie about blacklisted television writers that starred Woody Allen. Mr. Kramer wrote: '' 'The Front' opens, even before Woody Allen's archetypal schlep-hero is drawn into a scheme to act as a front for a blacklisted writer, with a quick-cut patchwork of old newsreel footage. We are given glimpses of the war in Korea, General MacArthur, President Truman, the Rosenberg prosecution, civilian bomb shelters, the Vietnam War, etc., toward all of which we are expected to take an attitude of complete and unquestioned disapproval.''

The piece generated an avalanche of letters pro and con, including responses from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (his letter in full: ''I wish Hilton Kramer's article could be made required reading for everyone born after 1940''); Alfred Kazin; the dance and film critic Arlene Croce; and the historians Eric Foner, Ronald Radosh and Louis Menashe, among others. A lengthy, jointly signed letter by Mr. Radosh and Mr. Menashe read, ''Having composed a straw man of revisionists who supposedly are trying to present an 'imagery of perfect (Communist) innocence,' Mr. Kramer proceeds to develop his own readjustment of the historical record by implying a fallacious picture of American innocence.''

The most interesting letter as a historical artifact was written by Michael Meeropol, the son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who both received the death penalty in 1953 after being convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. ''American Communists, whatever their na?t?bout Russia in the 1930s and 1940s, were not spies,'' Mr. Meeropol wrote to The Times. ''My parents were framed.'' In 2008 Mr. Meeropol, who was just 10 years old when his parents were executed, would acknowledge that his father had played a role in an espionage conspiracy but not in atomic spying.

The article has remained a favorite in conservative circles, partly because of where it was published. Mr. Kramer later wrote that ''there were a few veteran reporters in the Times newsroom who never spoke to me again'' after it ran. When The New Criterion republished it in 1997, Mr. Kramer wrote that it did so to bring its readers ''up to date on the mystifications and misrepresentations now rampant in the current literature.'' JOHN WILLIAMS

PHOTO: The critic Hilton Kramer at The New Criterion in 1985. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JACK MANNING/THE NEW YORK TIMES)